in and out. The officer delicately cuts it open and clear liquid pours out. I look into the dog’s eyes and watch the terror and pain change into an opiumlike daze. A sensual pleasure passes beneath their surface, a strange state of grace in the flight behind the eyes speeding up, the fading of life into the pale glaze of death.
Americans can’t deal with death unless they own it. If they own it, they will celebrate it, like in the air force base museum of the atomic bomb, where whole families of camera-toting tourists gather after the required i.d. security checks. In the gray-carpeted rooms, they walk the mazes of portable screens and platforms and enlarged photographs of death and incineration as seen from a discreet distance. The distance is far enough so you can’t see the bodies, only the architecture. The tour in this museum is led by an ancient matronly type who explains various levels of the bomb’s invention with all the glad bearings of a parent who has just given birth to her first child. I couldn’t deal with the clouds of perfume and the decaying personalities of the crowd so I wandered off by myself to walk the maze. There were machines that clicked on, set off merely by my presence and I’m walking through a paranoid blur of mechanical men’s voices crawling out of hidden speakers and image after image floating and shifting into fragments of large grainy black-and-white blow-ups of sullen men standing half conscious with pride next to sinister fat canisters looking like overturned pot-bellied stoves. The voices have all the tone and texture of high school film soundtracks explaining the abstract motions of the sperm entering the side of the egg and fertilizing it, or the hunger and desire implicit in the tiny snake swallowing the egg ten times the size of its own head.
Outside the shedlike buildings are the constant shrill vibrating sounds of jets taking off into the afternoon heat. Through a back window that overlooks the concrete edges of the runways I see a playground with defunct miniature jets and spare broken engines from spacecraft of the past decades. It is a playground for the kids and at that moment there is a family gathering among the hulls of bomber planes and world war two relics for a photo op. Standing in the shadow of a late-model bomber cabled to the asphalt surface of the ground a grandmotherly type gathers three kids in close to her body, fitting them in the frame of their parents’ camera shutter. It’s three generations of a family and everything is so clean and abstract that I’m feeling dizzy. I’m watching all this surrounded by two screens showing speeded-up videos of a nuclear reactor being built by men the size of ants. They build and rebuild the reactors in twenty seconds flat. I’m thinking if I owned the place I’d hook the constant smell of rotting flesh into the air-conditioning unit and have all the screens filled with speeded-up films of rotting corpses and the family outside the window is moving to the next plane for the next photo. A man steps out from behind a doorway I hadn’t noticed before and offers me his hand in greeting, asking if I’d like a cup of coffee. He looks like the kind of guy who’d one day end up in an alcohol detox center studying snakes and insects. I turn away without a word; I’ll never shake the hand of someone I might be fighting against in wartime.
We are born into a preinvented existence within a tribal nation of zombies and in that illusion of a one-tribe nation there are real tribes. Some of the tribes are in the business of sucker-punching people’s psyches in the form of maintaining the day-to-day job of government – they sell the masses a pile of green-tainted meat; i.e., a corrupted and false history as well as a corrupted and false future, and although that meat stinks of rot and pus and blood, this particular tribe extols these foul emissions as if they were virtues made of glorious sensitivities: “Raise Ole Glory while we do it to them again . . .”
Then there are other tribes which work hand in hand with the government, offering slices of meat in the form of doubletalk; or hope – hope as a chain of submission. Then there are the tribes that suckle at the breast of telecommunications every evening after work and are fatally lulled into society’s deep sleep. Day after day they experience waking nightmares but they’ve either bought the con of language from the tribe that offers hope, or they’re too fucking exhausted or fearful to break through the illusion and examine the structures of their world.
There are other tribes that experience the X ray of Civilization every time they leave the house or turn on the tv or radio or pick up a newspaper or when they suddenly realize their legs have automatically come to a halt before a changing traffic light. A civil war and a national trial for the “leaders” of this country, as well as certain individuals in organized religions, is the soundtrack that plays and replays in the heads of members of that tribe. Some members of the tribe understand the meaning of language. They also understand what freedom truly is and if the other tribes want to hand them the illusion of hope in the form of the leash – in the form of language – like all stray dogs with intelligence from experience, they know how to turn the leash into a rope to exit the jail windows or how to turn the leash into a noose to hang the jailers. But when the volume of that war reaches epic dimensions, and when the person hearing it fails to connect with another member of the same tribe who can acknowledge the sound, that person can one day find themselves at the top of a water tower in suburbia armed with a high-powered rifle firing indiscriminately at the ants crawling around below. That person can one day find himself running amok in the streets with a handgun; that person can one day find himself lobbing a grenade at the forty-car motorcade of the president; or that person can end up on a street corner, homeless hungry and wild-eyed, punching himself in the face or sticking wires through the flesh of his arms or chest.
*
I left one town and headed for another on the available interstate that led through sections of burst red earth and cables and tractors and pickup trucks and workers in dusty clothes running back and forth. It was a couple of hours before dusk and as I turned onto a lesser used road, the landscape grew more quiet and the car radio had navajo language chittering through waves of static. There were no other cars but mine and the one I was in didn’t like mountains so I had to drive with the heater full blast to cool the engine down. Big goofy cactus grew in the shapes of people only green on the roadsides among burned patches of sagebrush and the occasional shock of rows of some kind of produce in long irrigated stretches.
Last night I felt unbelievably sad and sometimes it happens that way: a sensation comes out across the landscape into the cities and further into the window of the car as I’m coasting the labyrinths of the canyon streets. It feels for a moment like nothing more than wind; it’s something I don’t see coming and suddenly it’s upon me and my eyes are blurring with tears and fragmented spills of neon and ghostly bodies of pedestrians and smokestacks and traffic lights and I’m gasping from a sense of loss and desire. I can’t think of anything I am truly afraid of and I’m trying to give something unspeakable words; some of us live in big cities so we can be alone, so we can avoid ourselves, and yet by living within massive populations we can have help or love within reach if necessary.
I am fearful of something more than fear: it’s something in the landscape surrounding the cities and smaller towns between here and the coast, something out there that feels so empty and it is not made of earth or muscle or fur; it’s like a pocket of death but with no form other than the light one might cast upon its trail of fragments. For a moment I think it’s just the unfamiliarity of the landscape’s agenda, what it contains in the future of its emptiness. I mean, out there I am in and surrounded by a void, a “natural” counterpart to the industrial void of the cities. Out there I can feel buried under the dome of the sky and feel claustrophobic in the heat which is like a plastic cushion pressing unseen against all the surfaces of my exposed body and in all that dizzying stillness I feel like my soul and my flesh will suddenly and abruptly be consumed within the civilizational landscape or else expelled off the face of the earth. What troubles me is that I might not mind.
When I was a teenager I had a recurring fantasy that began after my first motorcycle ride. This was shortly after waking up one morning and realizing that government and god were interchangeable and that most of the people in the landscape of my birth insisted on having one or both determine the form of their lives. I recognized the fact that the landscape was slowly being chewed up and that childhood dreams of autonomy in the form of hermetic exile were
